Alternative Daily Cover or “ADC” is a federal, state or local regulatory agency allowed product and process that is used in many industrial and environmentally sensitive applications. Examples include but are not limited to landfills, coal ash, industrial wastes, mines, animal wastes, etc. When a product or by-product, soil disturbance or waste is produced it has been determined by levels of government and separate industries that it is either desired or environmentally necessary to cover products, by-products, soils or wastes produced or deposited. These products, by-products or waste streams are usually disturbed or contaminated in some way and typically include dissolved organic matter, inorganic matter, heavy metals and a host of other known and unknown contaminants. These contamination or disturbed soils sources are collected on site and covered, sometimes at the end of daily operations. These agencies and industries have declared waterborne or airborne dissipation of these products, by-products, soils or wastes to be a threat to local rivers, streams and soils, as well as municipal water supplies and ground water located in the general vicinity of industries, waste facilities or waste generating sites. The traditional way of covering these products, by products, soils or waste has been with a prescribed amount of dirt or other approved natural or man-made solutions or mixtures. These solutions or mixtures are both laborious and expensive yet less laborious and expensive than past approved practices.
Traditional dirt covering and past approved methods and applications of approved ADC solutions, soil disturbance or other additive reagent, for example, are both expensive and inefficient. Typically past regulator or industry approved processes and their related equipment require considerable labor and very specialized and sole purpose equipment at least at the end of daily operations. It is the labor, specialized and sole use of the equipment and the sole source of approved ADC, soil disturbance, or other additive reagent solutions or materials that makes the past methods or processes extremely expensive. For example, it is not unusual for a typical size product, by-product or waste processing facility to spend more than $1 million a year in dealing with regulator or industry specific additive reagent requirements.